#ukteenchat Interview with Adam Connors
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Could you tell us a little bit about your new YA Thriller Romance, Find Me
After, please?
My main character, Kyle, wakes from an epileptic seizure to
find that the world is … different. People flicker in and out of sight,
buildings tremble and threaten to slip out of existence. In the ordinary world,
Kyle is still having a seizure, but his brain activity is spiking and, like a
near-death experience, it’s creating an alternative world, another version of
reality.
Kyle ends up calling it the Stillness, and the point is that
it isn’t a hallucination, it’s just a different rendering of reality. It’s not less real, it’s more real than the world we’re used to.
Was there anything in particular that
inspired Find Me After?
I wrote the opening chapter of Find Me After on the kitchen
floor, waking up after a seizure. I wanted to capture some of the fraught
energy of a seizure, that feeling of “coming back”. The few minutes after a
seizure always feels like a kind of hinterland, as if my brain is shifting
gears, as if something still has hold of my ankle and is trying to drag me
back. That’s where the story starts.
Did you need to research anything for
Find Me After?
Lots! I didn’t want to write about a supernatural
“afterlife” or purgatory, I felt like that had been done before and it would be
too easy to slip into well-trodden territory. I’d been reading about this idea
in neuroscience that the brain doesn’t just experience
reality, it constructs it.
Neuroscience is going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment, new imaging
technology and data processing capability is changing the field dramatically.
Neuroscientists talk about our daily experiences as a
“controlled hallucination” and there’s a growing body of hard physical evidence
to back this up.
So I thought: if this
world is partly a hallucination, maybe a traumatised brain could construct a
different (but no less real) version of reality.
For me, that kind of background is what gives me the
confidence and level of detail I need to make the world feel real, and it opens
up lots of directions that I wouldn’t have thought of if I’d just seen the
world as something supernatural.
Without being too spoilery, is there
a specific scene or character that you really enjoyed writing in Find Me After?
Jonah is by far my favourite character. He’s the main
antagonist and he’s kind of a nasty piece of work. But he’s a kind of “take
control” which Kyle can’t help but find slightly alluring. He’s a bit of a
force of nature, almost animalistic, and that is very much not me, so it was a
lot of fun to write.
Do you feel your approach to writing
or editing has changed the more books you write?
Yes, definitely. I used to get really bogged down on the
first chapter (maybe the first page). I used to think: if I can just get this
right everything else will fall into place. But it never did, I just wrote and
rewrote and never got past the first 20K words.
One day I realised that the best thing I could do was write
all the way through to the end. Once I have a dirty first draft, it’s much
easier to see what the book is really
about, and then go back and write that.
I actually did the maths for my last book, The Girl Who
Broke The Sea: I figured out that I wrote about 250K words to get my 80K novel.
I basically deleted two words for every word I kept, which is much more
efficient than it felt at the time.
I haven’t checked Find Me After but I think the ratio will
be smaller.
Have you always written YA, or do you
write for other age groups?
I did an MA at City University and wrote an adult book as
part of that, but it wasn’t good enough and it didn’t find a home. Then I wrote
short-stories for a while because it was easier to fit around two young
children. When my son was about 8 or 9 I realised that I was spending all this
time writing things that he couldn’t enjoy, so I switched to middle-grade.
My first book was middle-grade and won Undiscovered Voices
and allowed me to sign with my agent. My second book started out as
middle-grade, but my editor at Scholastic pointed out that I really wanted to
write YA, I just hadn’t realised it.
He was right.
For now at least I think YA is my sweet-spot. There’s enough
freedom to build in ideas that are sufficiently sophisticated that adult
readers can enjoy them as well, but YA also doesn’t take itself too seriously,
and there’s still room to put things in that are just … cool.
Besides, my 8 year old is now 16.
Do you have any writing rituals, go
to writing snacks, or a favourite place to write?
I have two very, very large monitors. Vast. And I’d have
more if my desk would hold them. I like to have my writing document quite small
(laptop sized) and then about ten other windows around it with notes and
pinterest pages. I share my writing room with my partner so I can’t stick
things to the wall, so my screens are my thought palace.
Are you a plotter or pantser?
Mostly a pantser. There’s a line from an old insurance
advert I always think about when I’m writing: You don’t know what you’re made of until you’ve had the stuffing
knocked out of you.
That’s mostly how I write, I knock the stuffing out of my
characters in order to figure out what they’re made of.
That said, I usually have a pretty good idea of where the
next third of the book is going and I tend to write that down in note form. The
best feeling is when the next block comes into view and something about it
surprises me. That’s when I feel like it’s probably good.
Can you tell us anything about what
you’re currently working on?
I’d love to write a follow-up to Find Me After. There’s a
lot of interesting stuff I’d like to play around with in Kyle and Jonah’s
relationship. Imagine, Kyle has always felt controlled by his epilepsy, and in
contrast Jonah is almost animalistic in his instinct to dominate the world he’s
trapped in. I think Kyle might end up a bit conflicted in that relationship.
There’s a whole science experiment going on in the Stillness
as well that needs to be finished off.
Do you have any writing advice or
tips you’d like to share?
Hemingway had the right answer: “Writing is rewriting.” I go
over and over the words, I delete ruthlessly and rewrite. Every time I sit down
to write, I tend to start a page or two back and rewrite the words I wrote the
day before. I probably waste a lot of time adding and removing commas, but
being willing to rewrite so readily reminds me that the words are actually the
least important part of a book — they need to be good enough to get out of the
way and not jar the reader out of the illusion, but ideally the reader isn’t
thinking about the words, they’re thinking about the characters, and the story,
and the world.
FIND ME AFTER - Out on the 4th July from Scholastic
Paperback • 9780702331367 • £8.99 • 14+
Available from all bookshops, including: HIVE
Do check out all the other blog stops this week...
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